My work is about seeing - seeing things like they haven't been seen before.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of unique perspectives in creativity and artistry.
Robert Mapplethorpe emphasizes that his artistic endeavor focuses on presenting visual experiences in innovative ways. By advocating for a fresh viewpoint, he encourages both artists and viewers to challenge conventional perceptions and discover deeper meanings in what they see.
In practice
In a speech about artistic innovation, one might say, 'As Robert Mapplethorpe once said, my work is about seeing things like they haven't been seen before.'
I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.
I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe.
As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.
If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child. So I wrote a number of books before I started 'Magic Tree House.' Then, once I got that, I never looked back because I could be somewhere different in every single book.
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